However, I don’t have any sort of formal CS-like training, and some of the problems the last couple of years have been rather hard because I’ve lacked the theoretical foundation to sort of figure out what kind of problem I’m looking at. Often it’s more math than CS, but there’s an overlap there.

I use mutt for personal email, so calendar invites is not an issue for me. I also have mutt use lynx to handle the case when the sender only sent HTML (usually, if there’s an HTML section, there’s also a plain text section). For work, I use whatever they give me—I like keeping a separation between personal and work stuff.

Do you mean invites aren’t an issue because you don’t use them or because you solved this? If so, how?

I read in another comment that it’s just html, and to be fair as I come to think of it, it’s been a long time since I had to care about mutt and calendars, so maybe it was just a dumb link to click through the terminal browser.

I don’t use invites or calendar things via personal email, and if anyone has sent me one, I haven’t noticed.

I did start using mutt at a previous job where I had to chew through a ton of daily mail (basically, all email sent to root on all our various servers were eventually funneled to me) and I found mutt to be much faster than Thunderbird (which should indicate how long ago this was). It was using mutt for a few weeks that prompted me to switch away from elm (which really dates me).

I gave up my resistance of modern email quite some time ago; it’s simply too much hassle, personally speaking, dealing with calendaring and rich media content in email to still use a console based MUA, but that being said I really miss the simplicity and lightweight of Mutt.

Mutt was my go-to client for many, many years, and I feel tremendous nostalgia when I am reminded that it’s still actively maintained and indeed has a user base. Bravo. :-)

How many emails do you handle a day? I do about 200, though I need to read or skim all, I only reply to about 1/10th of them… but I can’t imagine keeping up with that in any of the gui clients I have had. With mutt, it feels like nothing.

I’m trying to do more and more with mutt, gradually using the GUI client less. Still haven’t configured a convenient way to view html or attached images but the message editing is nice. I hook it up to vim:

This mostly formats things correctly, and allows me to touch paragraphs up by hand or with the “gq” command. I can also easily add mail headers such as In-Reply-To if needed. In some ways my graphical client is starting to feel like the constrained one.

I’ve been using Mutt for the past 15+ years for personal email and 5+ years for work - even with Exchange IMAP (special flavour) at one point.

I mostly ignore HTML email - either there’s a text/plain part or HTML->text conversion is good enough - there are occasional issues with superfluous whitespace and it can look a bit ugly when plenty of in-line URLs are being used but these are not that common.

For calendaring I still use web - we’re on G Suite - but am hoping to move to Calcurse at some point (still not sure how to accept invites, though). Bear in mind, calendar != email, and Mutt is an email client - once you accept it, you’ll be much happier :^)

I used it 2015-mid 2017 but ended up moving back to Thunderbird and even web clients. It wasn’t worth the effort. If I didn’t have to handle all my configs to get a decent setup (imap, gpg, multi-account, addresses) then I’d consider using it again. I love the idea of not having to leave my term.

I use mutt daily and have my mailcap set to render html email in lynx/w3m/elinks. It’s sufficient to see if I then need to switch to a GUI mail client. For GUI, I have previously used Thunderbird with DAVmail and currently just use the Outlook client.

However, is Nintendo actually making profit of the original Zelda, for example? I mean, is there a way for me as a player to get to play the original Zelda without having to search for a second hand NES and fishing for the original cartridge in flea markets? I get that is their intellectual property, but still it’s not like they still sell those games

The current philosophy of the law is that Nintendo has an eternal right to tax Zelda. It was never meant to go into the public domain, will never go into the public domain, and if legislators have funny ideas about this stuff then they’ll use their billions of previous culture tax revenue to bribe (er… “lobby”) them to have the right ideas again.

Anyone who gripes about this state of affairs is obviously a commie trying to steal from them.

In my understanding, in France and probably other countries, works (not sure what, but writings and musics are included for example, probably programs/video games?) enter public domain 70 years after creator’s death.

The original author(s) license (indirect in employment contract or direct via a specific one) rights to the work. The ‘death’ clause becomes really gnarly when the actual work of art is an aggregate of many copyright holders.

This becomes more complicated as the licensing gets split up into infinitely small pieces, like “time-limited distribution within country XYZ on the media of floppy discs”. Such time-limit clauses are a probable cause when contents to whole games suddenly disappear, typically sublicensed contents like music.

This, in turn, gets even more complicated by the notion of ‘derivative’ work; fanart or those “HD remakes” as even abstract nuances have to be considered. The stories about Sherlock Holmes are in the public domain, but certain aesthetics, like the deerstalker/pipe/… figure - are still(?) copyrighted. Defining ‘derivative’ work is complex in and of itself. For instance, Blizzard have successfully defended copyright of the linked and loaded process of the World of Warcraft client as such, in the case against certain cheat-bots - and similar shenanigans to take down open source / reversed starcraft servers.

Then a few years pass and nobody knows who owns what or when or where, copyright trolls dive in and threaten extortion fees based on rights they don’t have. Copyright in its current form has nothing to do about the ‘artist’ and is complete, depressing, utter bullshit - It has turned into this bizarre form of mass hypnosis where everyone gets completely and thoroughly screwed.

These aspects, when combined, is part of the reason as to why “sanctioned ROM stores” that virtual console and so on holds have very limited catalogs, the rightsholders are nowhere to be found and can’t be safely licensed.

I used Assembla for a number of years until 2017. The UI was somewhat clunky but I had no other issues so it’s a workable option. It also offered free private Git repos, although I’m not sure it still does.

You probably noticed the peculiar default line length. Black defaults to 88 characters per line, which happens to be 10% over 80. This number was found to produce significantly shorter files than sticking with 80 (the most popular), or even 79 (used by the standard library). In general, 90-ish seems like the wise choice.

This is a table stakes deal breaker for me. I know, I know, I’m likely old fashioned. I prefer old school. :-)

I just counted the length of lines over 266 Lua files [1], calculating the 95th percentile [2] of line length. Only 4% had a 95 percentile of 89 or higher; 11% had a 95th percentile of 80 or higher. And just because, 4% had 95th percentiles of 80 and 81. For maximum line lengths:

42% with longest line of 79 characters or less

46% with longest line of 80 characters or less

56% with longest line of 88 characters or less

Longest line found: 204 characters

[1] I don’t use Python, so I’m using what I have. And what I have are multiple Lua modules I’ve downloaded.

[2] That is, out of all the lines of code, 95% of line lengths are less than this length.

I can’t help it but read it as a fascist code, or at least I start thinking about whether it could be on every occasion I see this number (not totally unfounded, because where I live it is used this way every now and then). I don’t think they meant to use it this way, so I think it’s fine (more than that, good, because it devalues the code by not treating the numebr as taboo).

Personally I don’t like line break at 80 or 90 with python, as the 4-spaces indent quickly uses up a lot of horizontal space. For example, if you write unittest-style unit tests, before you write any assignment or call, you have already lost 8 spaces.

I have to say, I really don’t care to see this in a text editor. If anything it’d be nice to see vim modernize by trimming features rather than trying to compete with some everything-to-everybody upstart. We already had emacs for that role! I just hope 8.2 doesn’t come with a client library and a hard dependency on msgpack.

Edit: seems this was interpreted as being somewhat aggressive. To counterbalance that, I think it’s great NeoVim breathed new life into Vim, just saying that life shouldn’t be wasted trying to clone what’s already been nailed by another project.

You can claim that Vim doesn’t need asynchronous features, but the droves of people running like hell to more modern editors that have things like syntax aware completion would disagree.

Things either evolve or they die. IMO Vim has taken steps to ensure that people like you can continue to have your pristine unsullied classic Vim experience (timers are an optional feature) but that the rest of us who appreciate these changes can have them.

Yeah, but adding features is only one way to evolving/improving. And a poor one imho, which results in an incoherent design. What dw is getting is that one can improve by removing things, by finding ‘different foundations’ that enable more with less. One example of such path to improvement is the vis editor.

Thanks, I can definitely appreciate that perspective. However speaking for myself I have always loved Vim. The thing that caused me to have a 5 year or so dalliance with emacs and then visual studio code is the fact that before timers, you really COULDN’T easily augment Vim to do syntax aware completion and the like, because of its lack of asynchronous features.

I know I am not alone in this - One of the big stated reasons for the Neovim fork to exist has been the simplification and streamlining of the platform, in part to enable the addition of asynchronous behavior to the platform.

So I very much agree with the idea that adding new features willy nilly is a questionable choice, THIS feature in particular was very sorely needed by a huge swath of the Vim user base.

It appears we were talking about two different things. I agree that async jobs are a useful feature. I thought the thread was about the Terminal feature, which is certainly ‘feature creep’ that violates VIM’s non-goals.

From VIM’s 7.4 :help design-not

VIM IS… NOT design-not

Vim is not a shell or an Operating System. You will not be able to run a
shell inside Vim or use it to control a debugger. This should work the
other way around: Use Vim as a component from a shell or in an IDE.

I think you’re right, and honestly I don’t see much point in the terminal myself, other than perhaps being able to apply things like macros to your terminal buffer without having to cut&paste into your editor…

Let’s assume that it’s not profitable for them to offer their service to the EU if they can’t track their users, since that’s the basis of their business. Should they offer “opt in to tracking or pay a yearly fee”? Should they just leave the EU completely?

The “what should Facebook do if this isn’t profitable” question reminds me of the response to Taxi company’s being upset at Uber/Lyft cannibalizing their business: you don’t have a moral right to your business model, if it’s not profitable, do something else. We shouldn’t reduce quality of medical care because it victimizes undertakes.

If it’s not profitable, either don’t operate that service, or find some alternate business model that is profitable.

(FTR, I’m pretty dubious of the benefits of GDPR, but I think the “what about their business models” is one of the worst arguments against it)

The “what should Facebook do if this isn’t profitable” question reminds me of the response to Taxi company’s being upset at Uber/Lyft cannibalizing their business: you don’t have a moral right to your business model, if it’s not profitable, do something else. We shouldn’t reduce quality of medical care because it victimizes undertakes.

I think the Uber comparison isn’t half bad.

For example, in Europe, a frequent problem was that Uber tried to undercut reasonable regulations (like having proper insurance for passenger transport and adhering to service standards like having to take any passengers). Here, Ubers approach was morally problematic (“moral” being local and all), and they tried to spin it as a moral issue and users choice.

I’m not in the EU and don’t know enough about GDPR to make a comment on it specifically. I just asked what others thought Facebook should do if we assume that the restrictions placed on the by GDPR make their fundamental business model nonviable.

Well, they should do as any other large company that suddenly found their business model regulated :). It’s not the first time this happens and not the last.

It’s their job to figure out, as much as it had been in their hands to avoid the discontent that lead to the GDPR from growing.

I’m not precisely enjoying GDPR either (I think it has vast flaws and actually plays into Facebooks hands), but Facebook is a billion-dollar company. “What shall we do now that winds are changing?” is really their question to answer.

The question “well what do you suggest then?” posed to people arguing against Facebook’s business practises implies some kind of self-evident virtuous right Facebook has to exist at the expense of all humanity’s effort.

I do not agree with this position. The world was fine before Facebook came along, for many people is fine without it, and will be fine if Facebook disappears. Facebook is a leech on people’s private lives, minds, and mental health.

It is not up to the common person to provide Facebook with a position. It is up to Facebook to provide a position for itself by virtue of being wholesome and useful to society. If they cannot, then that’s the end of it. I owe them nothing, no-one does.

It is not up to the common person to provide Facebook with a position. It is up to Facebook to provide a position for itself by virtue of being wholesome and useful to society. If they cannot, then that’s the end of it. I owe them nothing, no-one does.

I agree, but if people continue to choose to use Facebook in the wake of the numerous controversies, then perhaps people just don’t value their privacy more than the services that sites like FB provide. FB is only as big as it is today because people use it.

I implied no such thing, and haven’t made a value judgement on Facebook or GDPR anywhere here. I simply asked what others here think that Facebook should do given the changed situation; I’m just curious as to what Facebook’s next moves could be.

I find that question much more interesting than your condescending replies and tired opinions about Facebook, a service that I don’t particularly like and am not trying to defend.

That isn’t actually in my normal usage pattern, but I just tried it and it works. The app lets me add entries to my pass database, and then I can push to my git remote through the GUI. What happens if a merge conflict arises isn’t clear though. :-)

Oh sure! I have an Android phone. All I did was install OpenKeychain and the unofficial Android Password Store app. I then imported my key into OpenKeychain and setup Password Store on my phone to use it. All Password Store needs is to pull from your git repo containing passwords. It only does this when you tell it to, so it keeps a local copy on your phone and you can sync whenever.

I think we need to wait and see, as GDPR will go into effect on May 25 and probably a number of practices like this one will be challenged legally. I personally feel this give-your-consent-or-so-long approach is not in the spirit of the law.

Unfriend Finder was sent a cease and desist order and chose not to fight it. I made my own python script that did the same thing, and ironically, Facebooks changes the fixed the Cambridge Analytica issue broke my plugin. It stopped 3rd parties yes, but it also kept developers from having real API access to our own data.

I also wrote another post about what I really think is going on with the current Facebook media attention:

You’re not forced to use Facebook. It looks like they’re following GDPR and capturing consent. It seems the biggest issue is the bundling of multiple things into one consent and not letting folks opt in or out individually.

When writing new code, I can accept that making tasks smaller and discrete doesn’t require as much mental scaffolding, therefore it might be possible in some contexts to handle being interrupted without it being disastrous, but most of the time we’re working on existing code. We are compiling code in our brains and making all kinds of mental leaps stashing temporary memories as we debug and process what’s going on.

I’m not saying programmers are special snowflakes; I’m sure there are other fields of brain work that are as taxing, but yes, interruptions are catastrophic for programmers.

I definitely agree, interrupting a debugging session is effectively resetting all progress. Not to mention the fact that the more you have to restart a specific debugging session, the harder it gets, because a sort of learned helplessness sets in.

What’s that quote about asking ten engineers for advice and getting ten different answers? :-)

I’ve been full-time remote for quite a few years now. The languages I use daily are Python, and for automation related work, Ansible. I don’t code in Java at all, but sheer weight of worldwide use would indicate that might be a solid bet for you too.

For personal projects I’m a big fan of Go, and hope to make use of that more on the professional side of my life eventually. I see it on the rise.

I have written a fair bit of Python but usually as glue code. I managed to convince my manager to let me use Go for a recent project and loved it. I am a Plan 9 fan and it all felt very familiar and well designed. However, in my current field - robotics - pretty much everything is C++.

Finally! Been following the issue for ages. So happy to see it implemented, and finally migrating my whole workflow to GitHub Pages. Seems like we may be burning the servers a bit because my certificate has been being issued for an hour, but that was somewhat expected.

I too am (patiently) waiting for the cert to be issued, having updated IPs in my A records.

Hats off to GitHub for dealing with this. For the past few years I’ve been watching the browsers take steps in the direction of HTTPS-only, and wondering how I’m going to deal with my otherwise flawless GitHub Pages hosted vanity domain / blog. Since the site is only a vanity domain and blog, I’ve been procrastinating on putting thought to this other than idly resigning myself to hosting my own server somewhere, and this is a rare example of procrastination paying off. Thank you GitHub! ;-)